Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 31st July 2010: “The Call of Cthulhu”.

“Your short assignment today […] discuss Lovecraft’s influence on [John] Carpenter’s oeuvre”

TASK Six: 31st July 2010.

I can’t talk about the films of Carpenter because I haven’t seen them, and I generally dislike post-1970 filmed horror unless it’s strongly science-fiction.

What I find much more interesting is the possible influence of the early cinema on Lovecraft. This appears to me to be a very neglected area, judging by my Web searches and searches of Google Books. And yet we know that Lovecraft was an avid cinema goer from the early days of the movies onwards…

“I am a devotee of the motion picture” — letter of 1915.

As far as I can tell from Google Books, this is where Joshi’s definitive biography stops in terms of examining the possible influences from early cinema and newsreels. Lovecraft found Chaplin funny, disliked the 1930s Dracula, end of story. A search of the index of Lovecraft Studies finds one lonely article with “cinema” in its title, and that on “Cinematic Interpretations of the Works”. Zero records are found for “film” and “films” or “motion”. Are Lovecraft scholars in need of a joint symposium with the historians of early fantastic cinema?

One of the many new unknown species being discovered this summer in the deep waters off the coast of Newfoundland…

Click for a larger version.

“Still at sea, a team of Canadian and Spanish researchers is using a remotely operated vehicle called ROPOS for dives off Newfoundland with a maximum depth of about 9,800 feet. The 20-day expedition aims to uncover relationships between cold-water coral and other bottom-dwelling creatures in a pristine yet “alien” environment, according to the researchers’ blog.”

Talking of which, Geeks are Sexy has its Summer Squidwatch report out today.

Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 29th July 2010: “Plush Cthulhi”.

“Your short assignment today […] Should Cthulhu ever be cute? What are the underlying sociological implications of the current cute Cthulhu trend?

TASK FOUR: 29th July 2010.

Ultimate spawn-baby of the home-brew cottage industry in Lovecraftiana, plush / vinyl / cut-out / knitted / resin / 3D-printed / kit-modded Cthulhi are the blogger-friendly stars of the age of the mass Internet (1995-?). They fling strangled LOLcats aside with ease, and rise to claim the topmost position of an increasingly large pile of clever and intricate and amusing re-workings of public domain / Creative Commons materials. Tethered by no grasping literary estate, no descendants of some hideously distant cousin of the author, they are free to rampage across the blogosphere. Yet there they remain. They cannot break through to ravage the outer world of Woolworths and Homes & Gardens. Are the hand-made ones profitable? Probably not. Or not very. The time put into making such crafts usual barely outweighs the profits. They make enough to pay for one’s food and drink at a Cthulhucon, perhaps. And doubtless there’s some marketing value — hang a big cute one on your convention sales table, to attract the Call of Cthulhu RPG gamer-kiddies and give the shy ones a conversational opener. But how many who approach will have read more than one or two of the original stories, and then only in RPG game books? Very few. Which perhaps begs the question: is the literary Lovecraft really popular any more? He certainly was in the 1930s, and again in the late 1960s/70s. But is he now slowly being fossilized in print?

Further open-access online reading:

Cthulhu is not cute! by Erik Davis.

Kraken Rising : how the cephalopod became our zeitgeist mascot by Mark Dery.